


Olive Oil

by arthureverest



Category: The Tick (TV 2017)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Spaghetti dinner, difficult conversations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-24
Updated: 2017-08-24
Packaged: 2018-12-19 07:48:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11893230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arthureverest/pseuds/arthureverest
Summary: Arthur is anxious to meet his sister’s new girlfriend, but is shocked to discover that she’s also ‘Miss Lint’, his evil nemesis from whom the Tick had stolen Arthur's bulletproof costume. How does he tell his sister that? Or that he’s quitting his job to become a superhero?





	Olive Oil

“Hey, do you need anything from the store?” Dot asks, “I need to get some new olive oil. You need to stop telling me things you read on Mental Floss or whatever, I can’t feed people rancid olive oil, not her.”

“Listen, first of all I read that on 538, and second of all, I thought it was a fun fact! I didn’t realize it would get to you! If I had known it would have bothered you I wouldn’t have said it.”

“Whatever, I’m going, I need to stretch my legs. You need anything?” 

“Nope. Thank you, though.” 

After the door closed behind her, Arthur surveyed her small apartment. She had been cooking up a storm all day, making a complex dinner for her girlfriend. They were still relatively new, but Dot wanted her brother to meet her for some reason. 

Spaghetti isn’t as difficult the way he makes it, from a box. Or sometimes from those pre-cooked bags when he’s feeling too awful to cook anything. He doesn’t like to admit that. The way Dot makes spaghetti is from scratch, semolina flour she buys online, or from a wholesale store, and eggs she buys from the hipsters that keep roof chickens, or whatever. He didn’t know the specifics, he just knew she went out of her way to make this special. She always did that, put in the extra mile or ten. She was always exhausted, he was sure of it. 

He had felt a little off the past few days, with good reason. A superhero has been following him around, telling him things, stealing things for him. He didn’t ask for that, or at least he hadn’t since he was maybe eleven or twelve. He was a little worried he was dipping back into some serious delusional problems but also... he kind of wanted to lean into it a little bit. He had been doing so well on that nonsensical scale of ‘normal’, and he hated the word ‘normal’, more than he hated people who performatively say they hate the word ‘normal’. He hadn’t found all this functioning to be very fulfilling. It was holding him to a standard that was so hard for him to reach, and he just wanted to stop, take a break, leave it alone for a while. He wanted the whole world to stop. 

He was half-asleep when he heard a knock on the door. He rubbed his eyes and went to the door, assuming Dot had left her key or something in her hurry to get good olive oil. 

“Welcome back,” he started as he opened the door but froze when he saw that it wasn’t his sister.

“Hello.” a woman greeted him in a sharp tone, a familiar tenseness that made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

“...Hi!” He didn’t know how to respond to the supervillain Miss Lint being at his sister’s door. He didn’t know what to do other than act like part of her dayjob wasn’t to eradicate his existence. “You’re here for Dot? Please, come in. She stepped out, but she’ll be back any minute. I’m Arthur, by the way.” 

She paused. “Nice to meet you.”

He gestured to the couch to offer her a seat. He wondered if she could tell how much he was sweating. 

She sits down silently, calculating what to say. He didn’t know it, but she was also confused and scared.

“you’re her brother?” she asked, feeling like she should have known this already.

“Uh, yeah.”

“She told me a lot about you.”

“Really?” he asked as if he was surprised. Even without thinking much of himself he knew that Dot centered his life around him. He thought about it all the time, and felt a pang of guilt at how his recent decisions would make her feel. He stared at the floor.

“She cares a great deal about you…” she continued, thinking out loud.

Arthur looked up, catching her cold eyes. 

“I would be willing to leave work at the office, at least for tonight.” He understood her meaning. She was sparing him. “Not for you. For her. You, your life? Are nothing to me, do not forget it.”

Arthur sputtered out a “yes ma’am.”

They heard the door open and turned to see a flustered Dot holding several different kinds of grocery bags. 

“Hey! You haven’t been scaring her, have you? Giving her the talk?” she joked.

She sets down the bags and blows a strand of hair out of her face. “All right. Sorry I wasn’t here, Lin, but I’m sure Arthur welcomed you well.”

“Yes, he did.” She said, calmer. Her entire demeanor seemed to calm in Dot’s presence.

“Do you want me to finish getting stuff together for you?” Arthur asked, desperate to not be left alone with Lint. 

She didn’t answer right away. 

“Please let me help you.” he said quieter. She nodded and sat down as he went to finish the dinner. Most of what he had to do was plating, and he had watched enough Food Network on insomniatic nights to know how to make a presentable dish. 

“Hey, dinner’s ready.” he calls the others over. They were in the middle of some conversation he didn’t at all understand, but it was weird to see Lint so.. happy?

They sat down together, Dot explained what everything was, and everything was going fine. 

There was polite conversation that Dot made an effort to include Arthur in, but only managed to make it more small talk than anything interesting.

“I… have to go to the restroom,” he announced a little too loudly, trying to excuse himself but failing to find a natural pause in the conversation to speak.

“All right, you know where it is.” Dot answered quietly as he was already moving away from the table.

He stood in front of the mirror and stared at himself. Was he really good enough to be a hero? Was he really? Was he really capable of looking his sister in the face and saying ‘look, everything you’ve done to protect me is great and I appreciate it, but I am going to put myself in danger and fight evil like your girlfriend, who by the way has been trying to kill me,’ he didn’t know how to finish that sentence. He didn’t know how to start it, really. 

“All I’ve wanted for so long” he said to his reflection, “is to make it so people don’t have to go through what I went through. For so, so long.”

His sister had done everything for him. Raised him, practically. But sometimes she didn’t know how to help. She trusted the medical system to help him when she took him to the hospital when he was at his worst. She trusted the doctors to not just do what was easiest. He was so scared of having to stay there he probably left earlier than he meant to.

His life was so different than how he’d imagined it as a kid. But one thing he always knew he wanted to do was to help people. One of the last things he told his dad was that he was going to be a superhero. He couldn’t lie to his dad.

He couldn’t lie to his sister. 

“Dot. Can you come here.” he called from the bathroom. 

She showed up right away. “Do you need toilet paper? it’s under the sink.”

He opened the door and tried as hard as he could to look her in the eyes. “I need to talk to you about something.”

“Can it wait? We’re in the middle of dinner. Lin really likes you, I think.”

“It can’t wait. She’s lying to you. I know because I am too.”

Dot scrunched her face. “What would she be lying to me about, what are you lying about?” 

Arthur couldn’t answer for a second. 

“Dude, are you okay?” 

“Yeah. You know what I wanted to do, before everything happened?” 

“Arthur, how are your topology ideas needing a dramatic thing in the middle of meeting Linosa?”

“No, not that, I wanted to be a superhero, remember?”

“Arthur, I know you’ve been stressed lately, but your thoughts aren’t in charge of you, you know that?”

“Dot, I met someone…” 

“What?”

“He’s a superhero, and he wants me to be his sidekick. Or something.”

“What?”

“I’m a superhero, Dot.”

“No, you’re just sick—” 

“Please don’t call it that, you know not to call it that. Dot, I need to do this.”

“You don’t even have superpowers. Wait, do you?”

“There’s a suit…”

“No…”

“Yes, Dot. This is what I need to be doing.” He started to tear up.

“Oh, Arthur…”

“Yes, I know. It’s scary. But I just… Remember when you first got to EMT-B, and I was living on your couch, and you came home and told me you just _knew_ this was what you were supposed to be doing? You said everything just felt right, even if it was scary to think about doing it.”

“Yes, I remember that. This is different, this is insane—”

“Please stop using words like that, we’ve talked about this.”

“Arthur. You can’t really expect me to—” she paused. “What does this have to do with Lin?”

“That’s the harder part.”

“Really.”

“She’s my enemy. She tried to kill me yesterday.”

“Ok, now I know you’re just stressed. Come back to dinner, we can talk about this after.”

“It can’t wait, Dot. You have to listen to me.”

“I’ve listened to you so many times before. I need you to keep it real, ok?”

“Dot...”

“Arthur, I’m trying to listen to you but it just sounds like you’re having an episode. It’s ok to have an episode.”

“Dot, please.”

“I’m going back to dinner. You don’t have to join us if you don’t want to.” 

He closed the door again, trying to wipe his face so it didn’t look like he was crying. 

“Well,” he said to his reflection, “That was the hardest thing you’re ever gonna have to do.”

Back at the table, Lin asked what was up.

“Nothing,” Dot answered. “My brother’s got some issues and they’re acting up tonight. He’s got a tax deadline coming up, it’s normal. He’s fine. I’m... fine.”

“You sound upset.”

Dot paused. “He says these things when he’s stressed and I know they’re just that— stress— but…”

“But what?”

“Sometimes I don’t understand how I’m supposed to react to the things he says.”

“What did he say?”

She paused again. “He said he’s a superhero now. He said that you’re his enemy. How am I supposed to respond to that?”

“He said that?”

“Yeah. Can you imagine? He’s just. He’s had problems since we were little, and he just—”

“Dorothy.”

“Yeah?”

“I can see you’re getting worked up over this.”

“Yeah.”

“So I have to tell you that he’s not lying to you.” 

“Oh, I know he’s not lying. He believes it, completely.”

Miss Tempest “Lint” Linosa did not have an easy life. It did not come easy to her to be honest. It did not come easy to her to tell the only person who had treated her with true and honest kindness what she did for a living. None of this came easy. But she bit her teeth and tried to explain the best she could.

“No, I mean. He’s a superhero.”

“What?”

“He said he’s been fighting crime.”

“Yes.”

“And I’m telling you that he’s telling you the truth.”

“Lin…”

“And what did he say about me?”

“He said you’re his nemesis or something.”

“It’s true.”

“Lin, I’m gonna need you to stop this, the joke has surely run its course by now.”

“Dorothy. Look at me. The Terror was my mentor. I have been smuggling superweapons into The City. He’s telling you the truth.”

Dot paused. “I’m going to need you to leave.”

“Trust me.” Lin said as she stood up. “None of it changes how I feel about you.” 

Dot waited until she heard the door close before she let out a barely-controllable sob. Arthur heard her from the bathroom and returned to the table. 

“Hey, I…” 

“I don’t understand what’s going on.” Dot choked through her tears, which were already spilling onto her spaghetti plate. 

“Listen, I didn’t mean to ruin your dinner, I—”

“You think I care about the dinner?”

“Well, I did, but then you said that, so I think I’m supposed to say no.”

“Arthur, I don’t care about the dinner. I care about you. I care about Linosa.”

Arthur didn’t know what to say. There was so much he could, probably should say. ‘I love you’, for example. ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘thank you for everything you’ve done for me.’ ‘I wouldn’t be alive today if it weren’t for you.’ Any of those.

All he could manage was ‘I need to do this.’

He left without another word. Without a ‘keep it real’. 

She sat at the table, and wondered what could possibly happen next.


End file.
